They say you should never meet your heroes. They’re wrong. I recently had the huge honour of spending almost an hour in conversation with Robert MacFarlane, author of 9 books including ‘Mountains of the Mind’, ‘The Old Ways’, ‘Landmarks’ and, most recently, ‘The Lost Words’. I have admired Robert’s work for many years, in particular his reflections on imagination and his determination to keep alive, in our minds and our culture, a whole library of words which help us better articulate our place in, and relationship with, the natural world. As well as being a writer, Robert teaches at Cambridge about language and landscape. As he told me, “the convergences of those two things, along with social justice and environmental justice, are the things I’ve written most about”.
Robert is one of the most fascinating people to follow on Twitter, and he had recently tweeted a quote by Rebecca Solnit where she said, “the destruction of the Earth is due in part to a failure of the imagination, or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can’t count what matters.” So, I started by asking him how he would assess the state of health of our collective imagination in 2018? [Robert made a few changes to the transcript of our discussion, so you will find the transcript below more accurate, but we know how you love podcasts, so we’ll share the original audio too].
“Impoverished, vulnerable, but with surprising flourishings. In that quotation Rebecca challenges something she calls “the tyranny of the quantifiable”. Actually I suppose I would oddly say a word for the tyranny of the quantifiable. We need to quantify. It’s vital for change, not least how we measure our baselines – how we keep track of shifting baseline syndrome.
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